Super Fun Salad Spinner Art

Kick off your summer play with awesome STEAM Activities! This fantastic salad spinner art is easy to make with simple materials. Combine art with science, and learn about forces. Look for our free STEAM guide below.

Salad Spinner Art

Combine a popular kitchen tool and a bit of physics for cool art and science that everyone is sure to love! Take this STEAM activity outside on a nice day!

Supplies:

• Salad Spinner
• Paint
• Paper Plates

How to Make Paint Spinner Art

STEP 1:  Place the salad spinner on a flat surface and put a paper plate in the bottom of it. Alternatively, you can cut a piece of paper to fit in the bottom.

STEP 2: Time for the paint! Add drips and drops of paint all around the surface of the paper plate.

STEP 3: When you are satisfied with the amount of paint, close up the salad spinner tightly. Get spinning!

You can check on your masterpiece and see if you need to add more paint. What happens if you thin the paint first with a bit of water. Does changing the viscosity or thickness of the paint have a different effect?

Simple Physics of Salad Spinner Art

Let’s apply Newton’s Laws of Motion to this summer STEAM project with salad spinner art. An object in motion stays in motion unless a force is acted upon it. Our paint spinner is a great example of inertia.

You might be tempted to think that this salad spinner art is also an art project in centrifugal force, but it’s not quite! A salad spinner does use centrifugal force to separate water from the leaves of lettuce. But this STEAM project doesn’t use wet lettuce!

Centrifugal force describes the tendency of an object following a curved path to fly away from the center point. Here the colors on the paper plate are pushed outward when the salad spinner turns, causing the colors to mix together.

More Fun with Forces

You may also like…

• Popsicle Stick Catapult
• Simple Physics Experiments
• LEGO Balloon Car
• Fun With Ramps
• LEGO Zip Line